What Murdaugh's Defense Found Under Maggie's Nails

Eight years after Maggie and Paul Murdaugh were shot to death, there's still unidentified male DNA sitting under Maggie's fingernails, and the prosecutors preparing to retry Alex Murdaugh for their murders are fighting to keep an independent lab away from it. SLED tested it once, said it wasn't a family member, and moved on. Nobody ever tried to find out whose it actually was. The defense wants the same forensic genealogy lab that identified Bryan Kohberger in Idaho to finish what SLED started before the remaining sample is gone. The state wants to test it themselves first, with the same method that already failed once, in a process the defense says risks using up the evidence for good. If the prosecution is as confident as they sound that this DNA is meaningless, an outside confirmation should be the easiest yes of their case. Instead they're fighting it in court. That tells you something. It's happening alongside another loss for the defense. On August 5th, a federal judge dismissed Alex Murdaugh's lawsuit against former clerk of court Becky Hill, a case built specifically to force her under oath and get her personal records into evidence before the retrial. Those records were the defense's best shot at tracing the anonymous email that got a juror pulled from deliberations during the original murder trial, and at making the investigators who cleared Hill of tampering explain that decision on the record. Both fights point the same direction, toward a retrial set for April 5th, 2027, with prosecutors seeking the death penalty and Alex Murdaugh's team refusing to take a deal. The judge assigned to the retrial has already pressed prosecutors on how long independent testing would take, a sign this fight over the DNA isn't getting resolved quietly before April.
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